Virtual drive for manage short and long term storage

Hi,

How can I manage as virtual drive or similar in a windows system, a bundle of drives (SATA and SSD) works as only one drive that internally sort the files directly short-term storage in a SSD disk and after some weeks move to big SATA disk in transparent mode (In fact, the path for the files can't be changed)

The question is that we have a windwows application that works with files, and we want to improve the performance using as short term storage for the new files will be saved into the SSD disk and after some weeks move to a long term storage into SATA disks array, but using always a unique virtual drive (Because the windows application store the path of each file and can't be changed)

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There are some great solutions built for enterprises that do this automatically -- systems like HP;s 3PAR, for instance, that can manage movement of "hot" blocks of data to and from SSD automatically.... but you're talking significant money.

If you want something on the cheap -- you might be surprised to find out that if you got a bunch of fast SAS drives in a RAID 10 setup and short-stroked them (i.e. set up a partition so that you were only using the outer, faster regions of the disks), you'd get performance equal to what you would on an SSD.

The cnallenge is that these are Linux-based -- and if you present them as NAS to a Window's box, you might lose most or all of the performance you hoped to get from the SSD.

There are also commercial software solutions for tiering data -- Quantum's StorNext, and HP's got an Autonomy product, for instance -- but I think these are designed to deal with tens of terrabytes of data. If you're talking about less than 10TB in a Windows environment, it's probably cheaper to do the RAID 10/short stroke thing, or just buy all SSD for the short term.

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At that capacity, id suggest single tier of storage that's sata/sas based with an ssd cache. Zfs would be my first suggestion, personally I use zfsguru, but nexenta is free at that capacity and can be easier to GUI manage. Remember to get a second one to clone to or backup some other way as raid is not a backup

Really my main point is that at 6tb you're not going to justify tiering. Depending on your iops needs, 4x3tb spinning drives in a raid 10 might be fast enough to saturate gigabit. That's the real question: what's the minimum you can get away with iops wise to still saturate your network. Storage faster than that is a waste.